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Home , Latin alphabet, Roman square capitals

By . U. FAYE

Landmarks in the Development of the Western Book

Mr. Faye is a specialist in the , and was transmitted to the Catalog Department of the University of Romans through the Greek colonies in Illinois Library. In this article out- South . lines the landmarks in the development of Let us turn from the origins of our the Western book stressing the importance to the chief materials (papyrus, of the alphabet. etc.) that have been used in making the Western book, and to the two main forms HE OBJECT of this sketch is to deal (roll and codex) that it has assumed. Tbriefly with the elements that make up the Western book. The following will Papyrus, Parchment, Roll, Codex, Paper be touched upon: the codex form of the A passage in a Greek inscription2 of the book, the material of the book (paper, year 305 A.. is evidence that, at that etc.), printing with , and the time, papyrus and parchment were the development of the , which chief materials of which books were is the alphabet of Western books as dis- made.3 tinguished from Oriental books. This al- At first both papyrus and parchment phabet appears today in our printed books books were rolls; later both appeared in (in capitals and lower-case letters), in 12:54-56, 1936. Published by St. Louis University. three main styles: Roman, Gothic, and The is an important element in the history of Christendom and of European civilization. Italic. It is the alphabet of native Greek literature and of Hellenistic literature, which, it is scarcely necessary to point out, includes both the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament. It is also the link between The Latin Alphabet the original Semitic alphabet and the of the Christian world, being the ancestor of the Latin Experience has shown that the Latin alphabet used in the Western Church, and of various alphabets (Cyrillic, Coptic, etc.) used in the Eastern alphabet, with its less than thirty letters, Church. In this sketch but one of the descendants of the is more practical for putting thoughts on Greek alphabet, namely the Latin alphabet, will be dealt with. paper than an ideogrammatic system, such 2 This inscription is published in the Corpus inscrip- tionum atticarum, 3:48. The passage in question is as the Chinese, with its several hundred discussed in . Birt' Kritik und Hermeneutik nebst Abriss des antiken Buchwesens. Miinchen, 1913. . p. 264. The passage reads: ". . . The marginal notes . . It is generally accepted that our alpha- preserved in books (ivfiifiyiois) either parchments (d^epait) or papyri ( &-rais) or in any kind originated with the Semites, was of tablets ( iv . . .ypannaTtlois )." The inscription, then, 1 considers both parchments and papyri as being adopted by the Greeks, who added books, while other materials that received are gathered together under and covered by the term ypafitiareia ( ypantiartlov, that on which one writes) . 1 . . Mylonas has the date for the intro- 3 Papyrus continued to be used for a long time duction of the historic Greek alphabet into in the papal chancellery. The latest known papal between the twelfth and eighth centuries .C. bull on papyrus is one that was issued during the See his article "The Date of the Introduction of reign of Pope Boniface VIII (1012-24).—Catholic the Greek Alphabet" in The Classical Bulletin Encyclopedia, 3:54. DECEMBER, 1940 33 codex form. Papyrus, being brittle, was marched in stately array down the ages. not so well adapted to the codex form as An examination of the of the Al- parchment. During the fourth century cuin Bible,5 written at St. Martin's A.D. the parchment codex became supreme. Monastery, Tours, while Alcuin (hence Once established, it held its own through- its name) was Abbot there (796-804) re- out the . As regards form, veals remarkable similarity between its modern books are codices. minuscules and our present Roman lower- The reappearance of the roll, in the case letters. How did these letters come photographic film book, has indeed de- into being? One must not think of the stroyed the monopoly, but has hardly chal- various styles of writing that have ap- lenged the pre-eminence of the codex. peared as being related to each other in a Our modern books differ, as to material, vertical genealogical line and descending, from the medieval books in one important the later script from the earlier, in dis- respect: paper has taken the place of tinct chronological layers. The Caro- parchment. Paper was invented by the lingian minuscules are not direct descend- Chinese as early, at least, as the first cen- ants of the Roman capitals, they tury of the Christian Era. It was brought "emerged"—to use a term that has become into the Near East by the Arabs about established—from scripts then in exist- the eighth century. The earliest example ence.6 in appears to be a document in Important scripts that have not had so the Escorial dated 1009.4 Since the inven- evident an influence upon modern letter tion of printing, paper, which already ear- forms as, for instance, the Carolingian lier had been encroaching upon the minuscule, must be passed over in silence. monopoly of parchment, after a while We proceed to a mention of the Gothic definitely took possession of the field. script. Up to the , medieval books were chiefly parchment codices, written in The Gothic Script Roman capitals, to which, in the course As the reflect of time, were added minuscules (by print- the genius of , so the Gothic script ers called "lower-case" letters) and letters is a flower of the spirit that produced the in the Gothic script. Let us proceed to a Gothic cathedrals. As the curve of the consideration of these. Roman arch was broken in the Gothic arch, so the smooth outlines of the Roman Roman Majuscules (Capitals) and Mi- nuscules (Small Letters) 5 A facsimile of the first page of Genesis in this Bible is given in Franz Steffens' Lateinische Palaog- The Roman capitals of our books today raphie, 2 verm, aufl., 1929, plate 47. This facsimile affords an illustration of the "hier- are, essentially, the same as the monu- archy of scripts." The scribes used different styles of writing for different purposes. As the Church had mental "square" capitals of the Roman in- its hierarchy: pope, archbishop, bishop, priest, so writing also had its hierarchy. The Roman square scriptions. They were also commonly capitals, being, as it were, popes, were used for the important book headings; the minuscules, correspond- used as a book hand up to and including ing to common clerics, were used for the text itself; while for material of intermediate importance other the fifth century A.D. Characteristic of styles of script were used. 8 Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt has presented a conveni- Roman genius are these letters that have ent outline of what took place in his "The Heritage of the " in A History of the Printed Book, Being the Third Number of The Dolphin, ed. by 4 Esdaile, Arundell. A Student's Manual of Bibliog- . C. Wroth, New York, 1938, pp. 3-23. For details, raphy. London, 1932, p. 36. works on should be consulted.

34 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES letters became broken and angular in reasonable price. Printing was the solu- Gothic writing; e.g., the almost circular tion. Compared with the output of the Carolingian o becomes jQf,—the circle is scribes, that of printing was mass produc- broken,—hence the terms used to denote tion. The essence of the new invention this script: fractura, by medieval scholars ; was that the letters of the alphabet and in German; and brise in French. the current abbreviations and ligatures With the material under the next head- were each cast into a separate and indi- ing we conclude our consideration of the vidual movable type. The tendency has chief varieties of script that have survived been to lessen the number of the abbrevia- in our present-day printed books. tions (a survival is X for Christ-, as in Xmas) and of the ligatures (a survival Italian Humanistic and (.e., is for et) that early printing carried on Italic) Hand as a legacy from the . Our lower-case Roman letters are de- rived from the humanistic book hand of Precursors of ; a Rival of the fifteenth century, a product of the Typography: Xylography Renaissance in Italy, being the fruit of In earlier examples of printing (namely study and imitation of earlier models of that done by wood-blocks for the making Carolingian writing. of playing cards, figures of saints, stamped There developed also in Italy, during textiles) that which was printed formed a the fifteenth century, a cursive hand, unified design; letters that perchance ap- Italic—a modification of the humanistic peared in the pattern were not set sepa- book hand, with some borrowings from the rately—the design was as much a unit as Gothic cursive then current in Italy. the poster is today. This hand survives both in and These remarks apply also to xylography. in our present-day cursive writing. In this variety of printing the whole page, consisting usually of illustration with text, The Stage Now Set for the Invention of was cut on a block of wood and the page Printing printed as a unit. The artist had to make All the elements of the printed book, as many designs as there were pages in the except movable type, were now at hand: book. Xylography flourished most dur- the handy codex form of the book; paper, ing the years from 1460 to 1480. Its in- cheaper than all varieties of parchment, herent disadvantages made it impossible and less bulky and more pliable than ordi- for xylography to continue competing with nary parchment; the Latin alphabet, avail- typography, which is the kind of printing able in the Roman square capitals, in that uses movable type, the letters being Gothic, in the Renaissance modification of cast in separate, individual types. the Carolingian minuscules, and in italics. Books were, indeed, made, but at great The Date of the Invention of Typography expense; expert technicians and much time The oldest datable specimen of typog- were needed. One of the results of the raphy is an astronomical calendar, which, Renaissance was an insistent demand, it is concluded, must have been printed in which scribes and professional calligra- 1447, because it is for the year 1448. phists could not meet, for more books at a Among the documents from a lawsuit

DECEMBER, 1940 35 of 1439 in which Gutenberg took part is among effectual printers, and, therefore, the deposition of one Hans Dunne "that may justly be honored as the father of about three years before (i.e., 1436) he printing. had made a profit of about one hundred guilders on material 'pertaining to print- What Has Been Achieved by the Printed ing' (das zu dem Trucken gehoret) sold Book to Gutenberg." The incunabulist Haebler Next to the alphabet, printing is the uses the documents of this lawsuit to dis- most important achievement of mankind. pose of Coster's claims to priority and to By means of the alphabet, it is possible establish Gutenberg as the inventor of to record the ipsissima verba which clothe printing. His implied interpretation of our thoughts. The imposing structure of Trucken, in the phrase quoted, appears to comparative philology is made possible be that it is equivalent to the modern and depends upon documents in alphabetic DruckenJ script. Preserved for us are the very On the basis of this lawsuit it is reason- sounds of the in the Sacred Scrip- able to assume that, in the 1430's, Guten- tures and in the masterpieces of litera- berg either invented printing or was ture—what would poetry be, if the sounds conducting experiments that led to its of its words were lacking? invention. The letters of the Latin alphabet, cast in movable types, are the essential element Johann Gutenberg the Father of Printing of printing. Later developments in the It may never be proved who was the mass production of printed material first actual printer in Europe. Claims (stereotype, linotype, offset, etc.) and in have been made for Laurens Janszoon the conservation of the space taken up by Coster. There may be others with claims printed material (film)—all these depend of priority over Gutenberg. If so, then, upon, as their final irreducible units, the after having spent time, ingenuity, indus- single movable types, the individual letters try, and money in inventing movable type, of the Latin alphabet. they have failed to leave for posterity Through the medium of printing can be products from their print shops or other communicated, practically without limit, testimony sufficiently convincing to sub- recorded thought. Anyone able to read stantiate their claims. may have access to whatever he may desire Gutenberg, on the other hand, stands of what has been set down of human ex- pre-eminent among the earliest printers. perience, endeavor and aspiration—all this No other printer seems to have had so because of less than thirty letters cast in significant an influence upon early print- movable type. ing. It is a fact that, from his activities in , printing spread through Eu- rope. Whoever may have been the first Selected References actual printer, Johann Gutenberg, besides General Handbooks of Library Science having strong claims to that title, may with good reason be considered the first Dahl, Svend, ed. Haandbog i Biblioteksund- skab. 3. for0gede udg. 1. bd. Hagerup, 7 Haebler, Konrad, Handbuch der Inkunabelkunde. K0benhavn, 1924. Leipzig, 1925, pp. 30-31. Milkau, Fritz, ed. Handbuch der Biblio-

36 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES thekswissenschaft. i. bd. Harrassowitz, The Book of Leipzig, 1931. Birt, Theodor. Kritik und Hermeneutik Writing (Ideogrammatic and Alphabetic nebst Abriss des antiken Buchwesens. Systems): General Works on Philology Beck'sche verlagsbh., Miinchen, 1913. and Treatises on Special Subjects Gardthausen, . E. Das Buchwesen im Altertum und im Byzantischen Mittel- Bloomfield, Leonard. Language. Holt, alter. 2. aufl. Veit, Leipzig, 1911. New York [01933]. (Griechische Palaeographie. 1. bd.) Conference on and transliteration, Copenhagen, 1925. "Pho- The netic transcription and transliteration; proposals of the Copenhagen conference, Steffens, Franz. Lateinische Palaographie. April 1925." Oxford, 1926. ... 2. verm. aufl. . de Gruyter, Ber- International institute of intellectual co- lin und Leipzig, 1929. operation. "L'adoption universelle des caracteres ." Societe des nations, The Influence of the Manuscript Institut international de cooperation in- Ullman, B. L. Ancient Writing and Its tellectuelle, Paris, 1934. Influence. Longmans, New York, 1932. Jensen, Hans. Die Schrift in Vergangen- heit und Gegenwart. . J. Augustin, The Discovery of Printing and Incu- Gliickstadt und Hamburg, [1935]. nabula Twaddell, W. . On Defining the Phoneme. Waverly press, Baltimore [1935]. (Lan- Haebler, Konrad. Handbuch der Inkun- guage monographs, pub. by The Linguis- abelkunde. Hiersemann, Leipzig, 1925. tic society of America, no. 16.) Scholderer, Victor. Gutenberg: the Man and His Invention. (Issued by The Lon- The Western Book don Times, Jan. 5, 1940-) Wroth, L. C., ed. A History of the Printed Uhlendorf, B. A. The Invention of Print- Book, Being the Third Number of The ing and Its Spread till 1470. (In The Dolphin. . . . The limited editions club, Library Quarterly, 2:179-231, July, New York, 1938. 1932.)

The Subject Specialist

(Continued from page 21) make it increasingly useful to those patrons libraries, decreasing administrative costs, of the library who are engaged in serious giving sympathetic service, and expanding research. These considerations, however, the opportunity for satisfying and con- will not prevent the assignment, from time structive work to the more ambitious and to time, of some lesser field of research to capable members of the staff, the principle a person whose main work may be general of division of work by subject as against and miscellaneous in character. division by process should receive the care- With a view, then, to smoothing the ful attention of the administrators of our path for those investigators who use our large university and reference libraries.

DECEMBER, 1940 37